1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a build message communication system and more particularly to a message communication terminal device such as a portable two-way pager device used in a two-way paging system.
2. Description of the Related Art
As an example of a prior art message communicating pager, a paging receiver with display is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,382,256 (Nagata). The prior art uses a coding mechanism that reads message data from a message table with a fixed column order to designate syntax order. Under each table column, there is a list of words consisting of a mixed category of subject, verb, location, date, and time. Therefore, certain same words need to be repeated across multiple columns in order to construct statement sentence messages as well as question sentence messages because syntax order is different between statement sentences and question sentences. This also opens the possibility that non-meaningful sentence structures can be created, therefore resulting in possible miscommunication.
There is another prior art in which it is required that each sentence be constructed by keying in each character one at a time to build words that will then build the sentence message. This requires more manual interaction from the user, opens the possibility that spelling errors may occur, requires more memory to be allocated and built into the paging device, uses more data and thus, increases the bandwidth needed for transmission making the process costly and time consuming.
The prior art has disadvantages in building messages. The usual method of building a sentence structure has typically made the use of fixed tables where the first word in the sentence is extracted from the first column in the table, the second word in the sentence is extracted from the second column, and so forth. This sets up a rigid sentence structure where the syntax order is fixed; for example, into subject noun that goes into the first column, verb that goes into the second column, location modifier that goes into the third column, location that goes into the fourth column, date modifier that goes into the fifth column, date that goes into the sixth column, and time that goes into the seventh column. If any sentence should fall out of this rigid syntax order, the sentence can still be constructed, but with the addition of repeated words placed into each column category of the table to make up for the different syntax order. This results in a clutter of words using up valuable memory space, and requiring the coding mechanism to search each category for the correct word, then determining if that word is even available in that category, and then conjugating that word. This method becomes a time-consuming process.
The prior art has disadvantages in conjugating messages. The conjugation of subject nouns with their respective verbs, locations, dates, times, modifiers, format, negation, etc. is difficult, if not impossible, because there would be too many repeated words to conjugate, and there are no fixed categories to direct the coding mechanism to find and reference as to which words are to be conjugated. The manner in how the words are conjugated also means relying on other related words within the sentence, and if there are no fixed categories under which the related words are grouped, then the coding mechanism cannot find and reference the subject noun that directs how the other words are to be conjugated. This requires using many Boolean type functions, that therefore makes conjugation of words a difficult and time-consuming task.
The prior art has disadvantages in transposing messages. The prior art coding mechanism also makes converting statement sentences into question sentences, and question sentences into statement sentences difficult. Relating specifically to a two-way communication system such as a two-way (receiving/transmitting) paging system, formulating the reply to a question statement would require the user to rebuild a reply statement response word by word because the coding mechanism cannot detect nor translate the meaning of the question statement. The user needs to accommodate this weakness in the coding mechanism by telling the paging device exactly what words and what syntax order to use to build the message. Thus, the user spends valuable time manually keying in information.
The prior art has disadvantages in translating messages. The use of a fixed table coding mechanism makes language translation difficult. If any sentence requires more than the designated number of columns allocated for this particular table, as in the case of translation into another language which may have a different and lengthy syntax structure, then the sentence cannot be constructed completely and may lose its meaning. The prior art coding mechanism would only allow for words in the columns to be translated, but this does not result in translating a meaningful message, as conjugation, prefixes, suffixes, and syntax order vary between languages. Again, miscommunication may result, or the sentence simply cannot be translated.